Symbian, Europe's most popular mobile operating system, has received $31 million from the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative, a public-private partnership backed by the European Commission that funds embedded computing projects.
Symbian has been "specifically identified as a unique technology that is a vital focus for European-centric mobile software development," Richard Collins, technology manager for the Symbian Foundation, wrote in a blog post.
The money - €22 million - will be used for the development of next-generation technologies for the Symbian platform. The Symbian Foundation will head up this development, joined by a consortium of 24 organizations from eight European countries.
"The consortium is called SYMBEOSE, meaning 'Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe,'" Collins wrote. "The precise aim of the SYMBEOSE consortium is to instigate a series of state-of-the-art development projects that will create new opportunities for Symbian's global stakeholders."
What does that mean? Basically, SYMBEOSE will focus on the creation of new devices that will run on Symbian, as well as mobile services that are likely to be most popular in the future. This includes more energy-efficient devices and cloud-based services, as well as embedded devices.
"Although this is already having a huge impact on the way in which personal content is being consumed and managed, the technical basis of how cloud computing should be supported for future mobile devices is still poorly defined," Collins said.
To accomplish these goals, the members of the consortium have been split up into smaller projects, and all participants will provide half of the required funding. Artemis will then match those contributions.
SYMBEOSE will focus on open source code development. "Conducting the work in an open manner will allow the wider Symbian community to take a special interest in the consortium's work, monitor its progress and contribute to the work to support their own plans for service development," Collins said.
The announcement comes several weeks after the executive director of the Symbian Foundation, Lee Williams, stepped down for personal reasons. Symbian is now run by Tim Holbrow, the former chief financial officer.
Also last month, Samsung announced plans to drop support for Symbian, effective December 31. Shortly before that, Sony Ericsson confirmed that it too would abandon the Symbian OS. In June, Nokia also ditched Symbian in favor of MeeGo.
A recent IDC report said Symbian will likely maintain its number one global standing by 2014, though it predicted an 18 percent drop in market share due to the growing popularity of Android. Gartner also said Symbian and Android will become the dominant mobile operating systems by 2014, with both RIM and Microsoft's Windows Phone OSes trailing off into relative irrelevance.